And you'll never see this message again. This list, I believe, gives you the broadest view of our world’s shared past. Grann—“nearly 40 years old, with a blossoming waistline”—resolves to tell Fawcett’s story and soon finds himself stuck in the jungle himself, captured, absurdly, by the same lust for discovery that killed his subject. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent 10 years reporting on a group of young men and women in the west Bronx as they paired off, grew up, escaped, returned, and tried to raise children of their own. When Aeroflot loses her luggage, the clerk asks her, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase, resignation of the soul?” She gets talked into judging a boys’ “leg contest” at a Hungarian summer camp. If you're looking for the best history books published this past year, the annual Wolfson History Prize is a great place to start. A deep and entirely platonic bond between the kind of people who celebrate receiving their advanced degrees by blowing glass tubes full of carbon dioxide into the wee hours is really not the sort of thing you often get to read about. But Wright’s refusal to rant and rave—even when presented with countless examples of church skullduggery, mendacity, and brutality, not to mention the sheer, flagrant kookiness—turns out to be his secret weapon. By Keith Rice • 12 months ago. For most true-crime writers, the lack of an identified killer would make this book a nonstarter, but Kolker, who has covered the investigation for New York magazine for several years, turns that liability into a strength. To read Stuff Matters is to see the humble objects around us afresh and to grasp the wonders they represent for the first time. Lawrence knew well the paradox at the center of a writer’s life, which is that life is the subject of writing and yet writing is not living; the two cancel each other out. This is the crucial book for understanding how one of the great social transformations of our era was not the result of the arc of history bending naturally toward justice but the arc of history bending thanks to the tireless, agonizing work of those who put their lives on the line. “They may not lead to a perfect, seamless arc, but they lead to a story that coheres in another way, because it is mostly true.”. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Coleridge (the subject of a two-volume Holmes biography and a friend of Davy’s) declared science to be driven by “the passion of Hope” and a vision of transforming the world for the better. To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes. Yet what reader hasn’t had her mind expanded, her heart plucked, her conscience stirred by a nonfiction book? Carrying us through it all is Verghese’s voice: empathetic, rueful, honest to a fault, and always kind. At least four and possibly as many as 14 murders have been attributed to a still-unknown individual who dumped his victims’ remains along a desolate beachside highway on Long Island. “Usha Patel was not a native-born American,” Packer writes in a typically astute (if atypically subjective) sentence, “which is to say, she wasn’t alone.”. Best History Books Of All Time: 12 Essential Reads On Western Civilization. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. Montaigne was a social critic living in France in the 16th century. He effortlessly brings the past to the present and makes connections between person and place, history and destiny. Z finally cost Fawcett his life, along with that of his son, when they both disappeared on a 1925 search. You may think you don’t care about a life spent chasing waves all over the world, but William Finnegan’s memoir so precisely distills the “brief, sharp glimpse of eternity” the surfer gets from riding a board through a crystal-blue tube on a perfect run that a hundred pages into Barbarian Days you, too, will have stepped through the looking glass. A fallen angel. Holmes is our greatest living biographer. You can cancel anytime. In this book, he follows the histories of telephony, radio, movies, and television, observing that early periods of innovation and access for small, nimble players (such as local telephone companies) always yielded to centralized control. 2007: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom', The Other America: Poverty in the United States, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll, New African American Histories and Biographies to Read Now. Jahren’s memoir is a paean to her life in science, specifically the kind of science that involves getting your hands dirty and reaching for a specimen vial. A propulsive, dramatic, heartbreaking book. This book constellates around Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician and cryptographer who founded information theory with a 1948 paper considering how to measure what it takes to transmit a message from a sender to a recipient—even if that recipient is just a subatomic particle on the other side of the universe wondering which way to spin. Released into a post–James Frey, post–JT LeRoy era when skeptics found memoir increasingly unreliable, Carr’s live-wire combination of autobiography and journalism explores not only the secrets of his own life but also the ways in which the stories we all tell ourselves evolve into the versions we can live with. entirely made up. This choral account of American life over the past 35 years is told from the points of view of famous individuals (Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Warren, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) and unknowns (a black labor organizer, a would-be entrepreneur high on self-help nostrums, an Ohio woman who lost her retirement savings to a Ponzi scheme, and in one bravura chapter, the city of Tampa as it underwent a cascade of mortgage foreclosures following the 2008 recession). The results, included in this collection of essays, were hilarious and revelatory; who knew it was even possible to write that way, to acknowledge how difficult it is for a certain kind of media-soaked mind to stop making associations and references, to forget itself? Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.” Macdonald’s writing is similarly gilded and faintly antiquarian as she pursues the medieval task of training the hawk, named Mabel, to fly to her leather-gloved hand on command. Many of them didn’t. As a general rule we do not censor any content on the site. The nation was founded by a group of 'intellectuals'. She is a professor of geobiology specializing in the life cycle of plants, and while this involves a certain amount of travel and mucking about, she feels most at home in her lab, “a place where I move. We update links when possible, As Kolker tells the story of how more than a dozen young women drifted to the margins of society and became vulnerable to one or more predators, he does justice to the painful complexity of these women’s family lives, their talents and dreams, their battles with substance abuse and sexual violence, and their fraught relationships with their mothers, as well as the friends and relatives who fought to keep their memories alive and the search for their killer going. Cullen, who was on the scene himself within 15 hours of the crime, spent 10 years teasing out the legends from the truth. Percy Fawcett was the last of the great white explorers, a dashing Brit who, in the first decades of the 20th century, became obsessed with a fabled ancient civilization deep within the Amazon jungle. Doctors at the American hospital where her family sought treatment prescribed an elaborate drug regimen to control her seizures. This is the man-made stuff all around us and so mundane we barely give it a second thought. Small Business Strategy. The timeline the book covers is extensive; taking you from time Columbus landed on th… Slowly, her pain clears enough for her to fill in portraits of those boys, that man, vivid enough to pierce the reader with a sliver of her own mourning. This list of the best history books includes bestsellers, Pulizter Prize winners and editor's picks from distinguished historians and biographers. Both sides were united in their devotion to the little girl’s welfare, and Fadiman ultimately argues that if the physicians had been more willing to better understand the Hmong people and engage with Lia’s parents and their beliefs, they might have saved Lia from her sad fate. It’s Fadiman’s commitment to sympathetically depicting both sides without ceding all judgment entirely that makes this case study so impressive. Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography - there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1), Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1), Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1), Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, What Color Is Your Parachute? Error rating book. Like all of Macfarlane’s work, this book is a charm against the streamlined, the global, the generically virtual. He is deeply curious about everything and everyone he meets. (A bald eagle in flight looks like “a coat thrown into the air, ragged and enormous.”) But the true subject of this gorgeously sorrowful book is the drive toward self-destruction, and what it means to live close to a person who can’t resist its siren call. Young Alison and her dandyish father were inversions of each other: “While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him,” she writes, “he was attempting to express something feminine through me.” This understated yet beautiful book, an attempt to puzzle out his life and death, thrillingly animates and embodies their relationship. Instead, Borrowed Finery is a kind of transcription of memory in its strange spottiness. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. In this unusual work, he considers several British scientists and explorers as the 18th century gave way to the 19th. Four months later, his body was found by a moose hunter. Gene Marks Contributor. The best history books of all time have proven to be truly galvanizing to the present since their publication. Eggers himself was inspired by David Foster Wallace, but unlike Wallace, Eggers was able to hack his way out of the thickets of self-consciousness, or maybe it was even further into them, and arrive at a rock, a kernel of reality, which was his love for, and commitment to, his brother Toph. Except that it wasn’t: Even at the height of the epidemic, scientists worked feverishly to understand the virus and its effects—and just as importantly, activists battled to increase those scientists’ funding, to focus and target their research, and to erase the stigma of those who suffered from it. It’s true that Fox’s memoir of the first 20 or so years of her life was published during a boom in autobiographies about awful childhoods, and Fox’s Jazz Age–style bohemian parents were …  difficult. The planet would eventually recover, he assures his readers—if “assure” is even the right word: The air would clear, the waters sweeten, and the animals, birds, and insects would take up residence in our old haunts. Even nonparents will be fascinated by Madeleine’s World for the ways it delves deep into the thought patterns and imaginative leaps readers half-remember from their own childhoods; for parents, the book—in its insistence that to pay attention is to love—can be almost unbearably moving. Refresh and try again. In fact, these historical nonfiction books are even harder to put down, because all of this stuff really happened. Stuff Matters describes how our stuff (bricks, coffee mugs) gets made and what it may someday be able to do for us (invisibility cloaks, bionic human limbs, exploding billiard balls, an elevator to outer space, concrete that can be rolled up like fabric or purify air). By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. In April 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man in search of wild, untrammeled experience, hiked into the Alaskan wilderness. We will not remove any content for bad language alone, A neighborhood is defined by its eccentrics, and Rhodes-Pitts seeks them out, chatting with old ladies, searching for the author of inspirational messages chalked on the sidewalks, subjecting herself to the lectures of one of the last members of a nearly extinct black nationalist movement. Hall’s quixotic premise—to write a detailed biography of his own daughter, Madeleine, from infancy through toddlerhood to small-kidness—works only because Hall is such a curious observer and imaginative interpreter of his subject. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The NYTimes Notable Nonfiction Books of 2020. Also read TIME’s lists of the 10 best fiction books of 2020, the 100 must-read books of the year and the 10 best video games of the year . Building true kinship starts as a choice and then often comes to seem inevitable, an act of will in the face of daunting odds that ends up feeling like a miracle. Her family, on the other hand, believed the doctors’ recommendations made the child sicker and failed to address what they saw as the cause of her illness: spirits that had kidnapped her soul and needed to be placated with animal sacrifices. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka in 2004, when she looked out the window and saw the ocean rise up and rush toward the balcony of their holiday rental. So instead of trying to reinvent yourself, why not read some nonfiction books to help yourself be the smartest, most interesting, well- Dreamy, meandering, and ravishing, Rhodes-Pitts’ ode to Harlem summons up the ghosts of the “Mecca of Black America.” As a Texas-born pilgrim to this vexed promised land, she found herself drawn not to the obvious inspirational sites, such as Langston Hughes’ house, but to the remnants of Harlemites past who have been overlooked or half-forgotten: a literary scrapbooker named Alexander Gumby, a photographer specializing in portraits of the dead, the operator of a wax museum. He is a well-read, brilliant contextualizer. It is the kind of devastation that might seem beyond words, and yet Deraniyagala finds them; she is, it turns out, a very gifted writer. It seems obvious today that the internet would trend toward the consolidation of power in the hands of a few major players, but nearly 10 years ago, Wu raised hackles when he argued that all information industries move from openness to concentration unless outside forces intervene. T he best nonfiction books published in 2019 look to the past in order to better understand the present. Congratulations to all of our nonfiction books that made the 100 Notable Books of 2020 list by the editors of The New York Times Book Review! After two years of careful consideration, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of all time. The 100 Best Historical Novels of All Time is a book list for those who enjoy a taste of history in their fiction. The Best Books: Top 100 Nonfiction list is a concise selection of books that provides the reader with an understanding of the social and natural world. Krakauer sets out to unravel the mystery of how this adventure ended in tragedy, and the tiny mistakes that cost McCandless his life, by reading McCandless’ journals, talking to his friends, and traveling to the abandoned bus where McCandless spent his last months. Laing’s readings of their work are extraordinarily sharp and sensitive, and her description of the places she visited and what happened to her there may be even better. This book might just be the perfect exposé: a consummate journalist writing about an outrageously malfeasant subject and raising urgent themes. ’Til the day that you die you will remember with squirming laughter Frazier’s descriptions of the nightmarish mosquitoes of Western Siberia, which “came at us as if shot from a fire hose”: “There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. But years of hunting surf also create unlikely friendships, from the Hawaiian kids of Finnegan’s Oahu childhood to the “goofyfoot dancer” who helps Finnegan find waves in the cold waters off Long Island, a quick subway ride from the longtime New Yorker journalist’s apartment. By the end of the day, Deraniyagala had lost her parents, her husband, and their two young sons to the Boxing Day Tsunami. Macfarlane cares passionately about two things: landscape and language. A Certain Kind of Fire That No Water Could Put Out. After 9/11, Armstrong, a former nun turned popular historian of religion, seemed like some kind of prophet: She had published her history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God, the preceding year. Kolker, who has an uncanny ability to play fly on the wall, catches members of the police and the media dismissing the victims; it was only the possibility of a serial killer that made them count. Surely the funniest book ever written about writer’s block, this “study” of D.H. Lawrence, a favorite author of Dyer’s, is more travelogue and memoir than the “sober, academic” work the author originally set out to pen. At the heart of this extraordinary project is the mystery of what makes a group of people a family. Skloot’s impeccably reported book tells a remarkable story of scientific development but also makes an impassioned argument about the way medicine has always used black and poor bodies. In these pieces, Wallace makes himself—and his doomed attempts to fit in and have a kind of fun he doesn’t really believe in—the butt of the joke, and a very funny joke it is (although less so in light of his suicide in 2008). A sweeping cultural history of the dominant American art form of the past 50 years, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop traces hip-hop back to its birth in the South Bronx and then back even further, to the Jamaican toasters whose style inspired New York’s first rappers. The Tennis Partner is, in part, the story of the friendship that grew between the two men as they interact at work and on the tennis court, with Verghese encouraging Smith to rekindle his love of the game and Smith counseling Verghese through the difficult end of his marriage. This collection also includes some top-notch writing on tennis, and Wallace’s still-relevant essay on television and fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,” but the cruise ship and state fair pieces still shine the brightest. Her charming, mercurial father drank too much and broke promises, while her mother simply rejected her. France tells their stories with clear-eyed compassion, leaning not only on his dogged research skills but also on his history as both activist and reporter for the New York Native. It is an account of grief that refuses to turn away from ugliness or wallow in sentiment, and yet it is acutely beautiful because of Deraniyagala’s devotion to the truth. American Ground is an inspiring portrait of American ingenuity when faced with an impossible task and a gripping exploration of the American psyche in the aftermath of a great shift in the world order. Midway through this wrenching and mordantly funny book, written entirely to an unnamed “you,” Rankine addresses the first person, the point of view of the traditional memoir. Take a quick look back at five centuries of great writing The roots of the genocide, locating them in the leftover resentments fostered by colonialism and a civil war is! To mustard all the essentials of a great history book cost Fawcett life... Winner ) Paperback $ 14.99 | $ 18.00 one is too hot to get anything done ; another is the! Just be the perfect exposé: a consummate journalist writing about an outrageously subject... Diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore this plan went by... I suspect most history 'consumers ' have a similar experience, locating them in the same place a.... 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